We all realize by now the huge importance of having a good search engine presence for your Custom WordPress Site and the many benefits it can bring to your business by ranking well. Normally, when I take on a new client, I try to explain up front to them that there are no magic bullets to getting good rankings, but hard work, dedication to creating good unique content, and some time will bring them the results they want.

Unfortunately, not everyone in the world is willing to put in the effort, or give it the time that is needed for the results to come, so they look for shortcuts, quick fixes, and other ways to achieve good rankings without having to do the work.

As we all know, one of the major factors to good SEO is backlinks to your site. When someone links to your website, it is like their domain is giving your domain a vote of confidence. In the beginning, the easy shortcut was using link exchange directories. You would visit a domain that listed a few thousand links to everything from Myrtle Beach Real Estate to places to buy Thomas Kinkade paintings. In this process, you add the thousands of links to your site and in theory, they will add you back giving you thousands of backlinks or votes.

STOP KILLING YOUR SEO

These sites are not truly giving you SEO value anymore. Once Google caught on to these techniques, they started making changes to their algorithm to not give the credit anymore to reciprocal links where one site links to another just for a link back. So then the focus shifted more to using programs that will mass email hundreds to thousands of people at a time asking them for a link. While both of these strategies don't necessarily hurt you, they also no longer help. If you don't believe me, here's a quote from Matt Cutts of Google regarding link exchange emails:

"The best links are not paid, or exchanged after out-of-the-blue emails–the best links are earned and given by choice."

Unfortunately, this tactic is still being tried by people. Here's an example I recently received (click to view full size):

As you can see in the email above, the text for mass link exchange might have changed, but the scheme and results are still the same. They just don't work. So when you get these emails, probably the best thing you could do is simply hit the spam button in your inbox.

3 WAYS TO BUILD GOOD BACKLINKS

Now that I've told you how bad an idea link exchanges are, I thought I should probably give you some tips on what should be done. Luckily Matt, already summed it up pretty well in once sentence. The best links are earned and given by choice. I believe what Matt was saying by this statement is that if you want to build links to your site, create good quality unique content that compels readers to want to share with their audience instead of trying to buy or trade with others.

Here are three simple tips I've used over the past several years that work well for me:

1. Pay It Forward- Whenever I'm out speaking to an audience about blogging and SEO, I share a story about a blog post I wrote on my favorite restaurant in Myrtle Beach. I wrote about why I love to go there and what makes it so awesome. That simple post which was all about them and nothing about me, brought me tons of traffic for my real estate business. When I finished writing the post, I emailed a link to the restaurant just letting them know how much we enjoyed our visit and share the link.

The restaurant then shared it all over social media, emailed it out to the other restaurants in their franchise, and the CEO even replied back saying how much he appreciated me writing that post and that he was constantly transferring management in and out of the area who would ask him who to go to for real estate needs in Myrtle Beach. He said he now knew to send them to me.

The simple post that took me 15 minutes to write brought tons of traffic to my site through them sharing and also some good SEO as they had shared on their site.

2. Provide Content People Want- If you are a restaurant, why not share some posts on how to make your signature dessert or your famous appetizer? Include a few yummy photos and people will share it everywhere. Don't just spit out whatever thought you had that day that brings little to no value to your audience.

3. Become The Expert- If your specialty is small business planning, then write about it constantly, become the small business planning expert. Share expert advice with your readers and give them something more than the rest. Share easy ways to apply the information to their own personal lives that will benefit their own lives as well as others and before long you will be the expert that others reference in posts, on social media and the links will grow almost exponentially.

So if you are looking for ways to build strong backlinks, try using these three types of content and skip out on all the link exchange sites and link email systems.